Tips for applying to Y Combinator

Be simple. Be direct. Nothing Fancy.

⌛ The deadline for YC’s S24 batch is April 22! We just finished the W24 batch with Ellipsis, so I get a ton of requests for application feedback, and I’ve consolidated my advice here (take it with a grain of salt, I’ve only applied once). TL;DR:

Team > idea + progress

Your idea will change; that’s what it means to be pre-product-market fit. A bet on an early-stage company is a bet on the team to iterate rapidly and figure it out; think of your idea and your progress as useful evidence. 

Don’t be discouraged if you feel like you haven’t made enough progress, because the amount of progress you’ve made is not nearly as important as how fast you made it. In other words: “slope, not intercept”.

Be simple. Be direct.

Explain your idea clearly in 1-2 sentences: who are your users and what problem do you solve? Avoid jargon, marketing-speak, technical intricacies, or an exhaustive list of features. Tacking on “...with AI” or “...with blockchain” is not any more helpful than “...with computers”.

Bad: “We are transforming the global software development industry with a revolutionary AI platform that streamlines the SDLC for tremendous efficiency gains using cutting-edge LLMs.”

Better: “We’re a developer tool that automatically reviews code and fixes bugs.”

Know your [potential] users

You should feel like an expert on your users, and have some unique/contrarian insights about them. You’ve hopefully identified a “hair-on-fire” pain they have, and you’re building a product to fix their problem. 

It’s hard to spend too much time talking to your users. Interviewing 50-100 people seems like a good place to start. If you’ve talked to less than, say, 10-20, it might be hard to know you’re solving a real problem.

Know how you’re going to make money

What’s your path to $1B in revenue? Keep it simple. You don’t need a 5-tier pricing strategy and a multi-year product roadmap, you need to know roughly how many potential customers you have and how much they’re likely to pay (bottom-up analysis), and how big the overall market is (top-down). Reasonable estimates are OK.

Remember, the VC model is based on a power law of startup returns, where one huge exit makes up for all other investments going to zero. This makes a tiny chance at becoming a $10B company quite valuable, and a high chance at becoming a $50M company surprisingly useless.

Should you apply?

Emphatic yes! YC was an awesome experience for us and every YC alumnus I’ve asked so far - it changed the trajectory of our startup. Even if you don’t get in, we found the application process itself was valuable and forced us to think deeply.

If you’d like some eyes on your application, I’m happy to help => nick@ellipsis.dev